


Ingrained and Enmeshed

by deathwailart



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Character Study, Death, F/M, Gen, Gore, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 05:59:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Altaïr Ibn-La'ahad character study written for a friend.  Set somewhere between AC1 and the varying memories Ezio sees but before the birth of Darim and Sef.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ingrained and Enmeshed

The sleeves and hems of his robes are never clean, nor where the edges of his minimal armour touch either. Dirt is ground in when he climbs or fights, dampened with sweat to leave an outline when he removes weapons piece by piece. The hems are dampened with things he does not wish to know, things that seep up as he walks through filthy streets in Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem. Bodies litter them, stacked high in shadows, bloated and black with rot and when he sweeps by them he disturbs angry clouds of black flies that buzz in angry protest to him interrupting their feast. There are rips in the sleeves and knees from climbing, fabric fraying thin until he has to find a new set, sending the old off to be burned, not even fit to be used for rags. He's used to smelling of old blood and dust, sweating inside his hood as he crawls over rooftops, silent as he can be, every movement attuned. He knows how his scabbard will clink, how his boots will scrape. Every step accommodates them.  
  
He looks like a wayfaring stranger but many know better. Bands of vigilantes nod in corners where streets meet after he has shown he is allied to their cause by helping a wife or a friend or a sister. Holy men let him fall in line, head bowed, hands clasped when he aids one of their flock. The thugs sneer but they know better than to do more than shove. They have heard what guards whisper of, the blade that lies in place of a finger, the one that will slice clean through a throat or gouge out an eye. And some have seen him. Crowds look on when he fights off guards, morbid fascination as he kicks out and feels the crunch of a knee beneath his boot, when his dagger cuts through the vulnerable flesh of a throat or under the arm or deep in a thigh, when his sword slices a belly open, guts spilling out wetly to the streets as men scream and retch, red froth at their mouths.  
  
But he does not want this to be his only legacy. Not now. Was he blind all his life? Were they all? He wants to leave behind more for those who will follow him and it is so very easy to begin to fill pages with his thoughts; he never realised until he began to commit the things in his head to a page how much there was to him. He works to build a future for their Brotherhood, long days of new techniques, refining them to allow for deadly accuracy and to reduce the chance of being seen until it is too late, until a blade silences them. Long nights too spent working metal. Reshaping. He likes that idea. Repurposing. Improving. Laying down plans for those who will follow and can do what the Apple shows when he lets it grow warm in his palm, golden glow bathing a room. It has helped him make advances but there are things that lie beyond his reach, frustrating enough that he wants to hurl the damn thing at a wall for all the good it will do.  
  
None of them trust it. Not even Maria. Maria who guides his hand from it and chides him. Maria is good for him with her fire, tempered differently to his and the day they have children, he wants them to get their spirit from her.   
  
The Holy Land changes but there is always blood, there is always sweat and dirt, the sickly musk of a ripe corpse or the plague smell when a sickness comes from dirty water and spreads through the slums, an acrid reek of incense unable to cover it. There are always rips in his robes and stains that never come out, boots he wears until they begin to show the first signs of rot and there is the sea he never trusts that he travels on only when there is no choice. Maria laughs at him, hood back, hair blowing free from where she ties it, watching the land shrink away to nothingness. There is no place to hide, there is nothing to cling to, no shadows to swallow him and that is how he was raised, to know cities and the countryside and how to survey from the highest points where the eagles made their nests. Eagles that would sit by him, their eyes narrow slits of gold as they watched him try to fly like they did even as he plummeted to the ground.  
  
These are the things he does not pass on. These are lessons a man and woman must learn themselves, a journey etched into their bodies as surely as the lines of their palms and on their faces as they age, walking the same footsteps as their forebears. That is the legacy he leaves for them to learn for themselves with no codex, no clues, no things meant for only a certain set of eyes. The thing that will outlast him when he is a skeleton, when he is dust in the wind who did what he could to leave behind something worthy for the next to carry on.   
  
After all, this legacy is never just his; it would be folly to ever assume otherwise.


End file.
